Opinion: Energy East is a trap that Quebec should avoid

Members of Stop Energy East Halifax protest outside the library in Halifax on Monday, Jan. 26, 2015. The event took place as officials with the National Energy Board met with groups during closed-door meetings about their pipeline safety and environmental protection programs.Andrew Vaughan / THE CANADIAN PRESS

Environmental and citizens’ groups across Quebec are celebrating a bittersweet victory this week. TransCanada has finally agreed to submit a limited environmental impact study of its Energy East pipeline project to Quebec authorities. However, as a result of negotiations with the province, important aspects have been excluded from the assessment process.

Having ditched the bulldozer approach, the public relations staff at TransCanada now seem to be out to gain social acceptance for the project.

It my profound conviction, as an informed citizen, an environmentalist and an economist, that Energy East should be opposed without compromise. It is a trap.

The pipeline’s purpose is to bring diluted bitumen to tidewater, in order to sell oil on international markets. Any local consumption in Eastern Canada is incidental.

A pipeline of any sort implies environmental and health risks, which can be partly mitigated with appropriate investments and technology. Energy East will cross more than 860 bodies of water, including the St. Lawrence River, where the drinking water of more than 5 million people is at risk.

The real goal here is to expand oilsands extraction, not to meet the needs of current production capacity. This will have devastating effects on greenhouse-gas production. Before it is even burned, every gallon of this oil will have sent into the sky up to four times as much CO2 as the conventional oil we still produce in Alberta and Saskatchewan.

Energy East’s useful life would be at least 40 years. This suggests Canada would be expanding oilsands production until 2060, when the rest in the world, in theory, will have moved away from dependency on hydrocarbon combustion. Canada will be trapped for the next five decades, addicted to extreme oil extraction with all the deleterious economic and environmental effects that would follow.

Is this a really problem? Could we not expand the sands and use the revenue to finance a green transition? And could not Energy East be part of the transition solution?

These questions bring us to heart of the Energy East trap.

Climate science tells us that 85 per cent of oilsands reserves must stay in the ground until at least 2050 if we want to avoid a collapse of the Earth’s climate. Energy East would free for burning an equivalent of 32 million tonnes of CO2 a year. At this rate, the sky would fill up with greenhouse gases before we run out of oil to pump out of the ground.

One can expect energy companies to do all they can to realize the value locked in the ground. But we know that we have to move away from our carbon-based economy, and that we have to do it fast.

The problem with Energy East is that it is instrumental to a rapid expansion of the oilsands complex, and that this will further deepen the grip of extraction industries on the west. It will multiply the economic distortions in Canada as a whole — on our private sector investment where the oil sector is crowding out other industries, on our currency and on our labour markets. Oilsands expansion will also mean committing all our gains in the development of renewable sources of energy to “green” oilsands extraction, instead of directly mobilizing this energy to free our economy from hydrocarbons.

So the real debate is not about which aspects of Energy East should be modified and greened to build social acceptance for the pipeline project. No, that’s precisely the trap that is being set. The real debate pits those that act according to the principle of the economic pressure to extract and those who, in the name of the imperative of a just ecological transition, oppose Energy East, knowing that the pipeline is instrumental to the expansion of an industry that must be wound down in a planned and rational manner.

Between these two forces, there can be no compromise or middle ground.

Éric Pineault is an economist and professor at the Institute of environmental science and department of Sociology at UQAM, and author of Le Piège Énergie Est (The Energy East Trap) published this week at Écoscociété.

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